Bianca Jagger Biography

Birth Name : Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías

Date of Birth : 2 May 1945, Managua, Nicaragua

Occupation : Human Rights Advocate

Jagger was born in Managua, Nicaragua. Her father was a successful import-export merchant and her mother a housewife. They divorced when Bianca was ten and she stayed with her mother, who had to take care of three children on a small income. She received a scholarship to study political science in France at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. She has also been influenced by Gandhi's non-violent success and the eastern philosophy at large. She traveled extensively in India.

Jagger's very arrival in 1971 was a major international media event. She was born in Paris, France, that October, just a few months after her father wed Nicaraguan beauty Bianca Perez Moreno de Macias. The Stones were at the peak of their fame at the time, and the couple was reportedly already suffering.

Bianca Jagger founded the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, which she chairs. She returned to Nicaragua to look for her parents after the 1972 Nicaragua earthquake, which destroyed Managua, the capital, leaving a toll of more than 10,000 deaths and tens of thousands homeless.

In early 1979, Jagger visited Nicaragua with an International Red Cross delegation and was shocked by the brutality and oppression that the Somoza regime carried out there. This persuaded her to commit herself to the issues of justice and human rights.

In the 1980s, she worked to oppose US government intervention in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution. She has also opposed the death penalty and defended the rights of women and of indigenous peoples in Latin America, notably the Yanomami tribe in Brazil against the invasion of gold miners. She spoke up for victims of the conflicts in Bosnia and Serbia. Her writings were published in several newspapers (including the New York Times and the Sunday Express). From the late 1970s she collaborated with many humanitarian organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

She was also a member of the Twentieth Century Task Force to Apprehend War Criminals, and a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust. She gave a reading at the start of the memorial service in London's Westminster Cathedral, which was timed to coincide with the funeral in Brazil of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot eight times on a tube-train after being mistaken for a suicide bomber in London. In March 2007 she became involved with Sarah Teather and the campaign to close Guantanamo Bay.

In March 2002, Jagger travelled to Afghanistan with a delegation of fourteen women, organised by Global Exchange to support Afghan women’s projects. On December 16, 2003 Jagger was nominated Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador.

From 2007 to 2009 she was Chair of the World Future Council. On July 7, 2007, Jagger presented at the German leg of Live Earth in Hamburg. In July 2008, she was a signatory to a petition to the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to allow the wider celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. In January 2009, Jagger addressed some 12,000 people who rallied in Trafalgar Square in protest against an Israeli offensive in the Gaza several days earlier.

On October 8, 2010 she spoke at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) 2010 world conference on moving beyond petroleum and "Crimes against Present and Future Generations".